The question of what we should do about “tainted” public commemorations—commemorations of people who were responsible for injustice, or commemorations of events of injustice themselves—has become increasingly pressing. Two views dominate public discussions. According to the preservationist view, tainted commemorations should not be removed; instead, they should be preserved. According to another, activist view, these commemorations should be removed. There are, of course, a range of other views—such as adding contextualising information, relocating the commemorations, housing them in museums, or installing counter-commemorations. But these views do not get very much traction, nor do they appear to satisfy what activists and preservationists want.
 
I argue that the vandalism of tainted commemorations can be regarded as a way of negotiating the demands of the activist and preservationist views. This argument proceeds in several stages. First, I clarify the activist and preservationist views, and argue that they are less naïve than has been assumed. Second, I evaluate two other responses to tainted commemorations—adding contextualising information, and establishing counter-commemorations—and argue that they fail to negotiate the demands of both the activist and the preservationist views. Finally, I argue that vandalism succeeds in this way.
 
It is worth considering a little more background before we go on. Activists all over the world regularly engage in vandalism of tainted commemorations. Such vandalism is often frowned upon, even by those people who are sympathetic to the activists’ causes. Many of them think that activists should not vandalise statues at all. Many others regard vandalism as an important though unfortunate stepping-stone to the eventual goal of removing tainted commemorations. Set against this backdrop, my defence of vandalism does two things. First, it rehabilitates and vindicates some acts of vandalism that activists are committing—by way of showing that they secure for us some important goals. Second, it goes some way in showing how vandalism can be regarded as a permanent, rather than a merely transitionary, response to tainted commemorations.
 
Activists and Preservationists
 
To begin with, we must rehabilitate activist and preservationist views. First, many activists call for the removal of tainted commemorations. These calls are often dismissed, especially by the general public. For instance, activists arguing for the removal of the statue of Rhodes in Oxford are described as taking the easy option by focusing on statues rather than the “real” or more important issue of inclusion and representation. They are also described as seeking safe spaces where they can be shielded from offence and discomfort. Indeed, they have been told to “think about being educated somewhere else” if they cannot embrace the discomfort that comes with debating difficult issues.[1]
 
These dismissals are uncharitable and, moreover, mistaken. Tainted commemorations are not innocuous. Instead, they are important parts of what may be described as the fabric of a community—these commemorations (and the views that underlie them) are supported by a complex network of institutional arrangements and social practices that, when taken together, present certain views as natural or as the norm. Moreover, tainted commemorations reinforce support for those arrangements and practices, further entrenching the associated views. And these views are deeply problematic, to say the very least. In the case of the statue of Cecil Rhodes, these are views about the glory of colonial and imperial conquest, development and administration, and the acceptability of racial (white) supremacy—even if it comes at the expense of exploitation and oppression, among others. Or, at their worst, these are views that “colonised” people simply do not matter at all—their lives are not important, and their deaths not lamentable in the same ways as white British people. These are views that are corrosive of the self-respect of members of certain minority groups. Activists are therefore not simply seeking to create safe spaces where they can be free from offense or discomfort. Instead, their calls to remove tainted commemorations are more charitably seen as demands to secure self-respect.
 
On the other hand, preservationists are also often dismissed, especially by progressive activists. Part of this may be related to the heightened language that preservationists use to describe the removal of tainted commemorations. For instance, many prominent historians and academics have described the Rhodes Must Fall campaign as seeking to ‘eradicate Rhodes from our consciousness’,[2] to ‘obliterate painful and offensive figures from the historical record’,[3] as ‘expunging Rhodes from history’,[4] or as ‘erasing history’,[5] and so on.
 
I suggest that these statements make sense in the context of deeper requirements concerning our dealings with the past—that our dealings with the past must be public, and incorporated into our everyday consciousness and understanding of our history and identity. A reconstruction of what could be the preservationists’ ideal scenario illustrates the point. In this ideal scenario, the actions of Cecil Rhodes, and the values that undergirded them, should be part of the everyday consciousness and understanding of members of the community, of their own history and identities. This does not mean that they endorse those values, only that recognition of these values is incorporated into their self-understanding. Members of the community should be able to recount—even if only in general terms—how Rhodes’ actions have influenced their society, and how the actions of “ordinary” British citizens during his time contributed to his projects. That is, there should be a general understanding of the fact that these “ordinary” British citizens during Rhodes’ time shared the values that undergirded his actions; that many of them did not regard his actions (or their own contributions to them) as abhorrent but saw them as worthy of celebration.[6]
 
Members of the community, then, should not turn away from the fact that they have inherited a world that is shaped by the injustices caused by their ancestors. Moreover, they recognise that one does not need to be a moral monster to be responsible for, or complicit in, injustice. Indeed, people can be deeply involved in injustice by engaging in purportedly ordinary, or even socially valorised, activities.
 
Seeing the preservationist view in this way also helps us to explain the discomfort that many of them have about removing and relocating tainted commemorations to museums. Here, the worry is presumably that doing so will reduce the likelihood that these commemorations can be publicly incorporated into our everyday consciousness and understanding of our history and identity.
 
There is of course much more to say about the plausibility of these views. But for our purposes, I take it that the two opposing views are undergirded by plausible (but potentially competing) aims—concerning self-respect and remembrance. I take them as setting constraints on what we ought to do about tainted commemorations. That is, what we want is to find a response to these monuments that can, in principle, satisfy proponents of both views. A successful response must remove the threat to the self-respect of some members of the community, while not reducing everyday occasions for public remembrance.
 
What about other “middle ground” responses to tainted commemorations—adding contextualising information to tainted commemorations, or installing counter memorials near them? I argue that neither succeeds in satisfying proponents of both the activist and preservationist views.
 
Installing counter-memorials can help to address worries about who or whose contributions count as important enough to be commemorated by the community. For example, consider the establishment of a counter-memorial—the Unsung Founders Memorial—beside the Silent Sam Confederate Statue at UNC Chapel Hill. Insofar as the establishment of the counter-memorials leaves the original statue untouched, it is a response that satisfies preservationists. It also appears to satisfy activists—it seems to address the neglect of the contribution of some members of society, by indicating that they too are worthy of commemoration. It also appears to mitigate the threat to self-respect of some members of the community, who are now regarded as having the standing—as equals within the community—to commemorate their own people and their contributions.
 
However, this is merely apparent. The establishment of the counter-memorial did little to stop the protests against the tainted commemoration in Chapel Hill. Indeed, the protests continued and culminated in the purportedly illegal toppling and removal of the Silent Sam Confederate Statue in 2018. For the activists who toppled the statue, establishing the counter memorial did not appear to address their complaints about the tainted commemoration. This observation is not unique to Chapel Hill. The historian Dell Upton observes that the establishment of counter memorials does not typically cancel out or repudiate the messages of tainted commemorations. Instead, their existence facilitates the development of a convoluted ideology of “dual heritage”, according to which different groups of people—in this case, black and white Americans—simply took different but equally honourable paths to their current status as equals members of the community. More generally, counter memorials also leave open the possibility of viewing the original tainted commemoration in isolation from the counter memorials. They also leave the tainted commemorations in place, untouched in their original glory.
 
Adding contextualising information to tainted commemorations appears to be more promising, in virtue of its potential to directly address and repudiate the views expressed by a tainted commemoration. It also appears less easy—though nonetheless possible—to view a tainted commemoration in isolation from the contextualising information. However, contextualising information is often presented in the form of small displays or plaques, which can be easily missed by people who interact with or merely pass by the tainted commemorations. In this way, the good work that they can do is limited by their nature. Of course, there is nothing stopping us from establishing massive contextualising plaques—perhaps as grand as the tainted commemoration itself—with an extensive essay detailing the injustice and repudiating it. But if we do this, we run into worries about aesthetics and accessibility—we typically recoil at building ugly structures in public spaces.
 
Vandalism
 
Having set aside these two options, I move to the defence of vandalism. Vandalising tainted commemorations immediately communicates repudiation of the target of commemoration. This can be done in very simple ways—by splashing red paint on tainted commemorations to convey that the person being commemorated was responsible for grave injustices, for example. It is much easier to understand the repudiation that accompanies vandalism, compared to adding contextualising information. Additionally, and unlike establishing counter-memorials or adding contextualising information, vandalism leaves no room for audiences to view the commemoration in isolation from the repudiation. Importantly, vandalism can transform a tainted commemoration from a public honouring of an inappropriate target into a public repudiation of the historical figure. Through such a transformation, the threat to the self-respect of some members within the community is removed or, at the very least, mitigated. It is further mitigated if the state or public officials permit the commemorations to stay vandalised, rather than attempt to clean them up. Notice that insofar as vandalism can do all these things, it becomes far more viable as a permanent—rather than merely transitionary—response to tainted commemorations.
 
There are, of course, several worries about vandalism as a response. First, it is often thought that vandals are ignorant about the value of that which they vandalise, or ignorant about the meaning of their vandalism. Second, insofar as vandals typically carry out their vandalism when nobody is around, and moreover often do not reveal their identities, they are regarded as cowardly. Third, vandals are often dismissed as not representative of the community for whom they speak. Finally, vandalism is illegal.
 
Vandalism can overcome these worries. The first two worries may be mitigated if vandalism is carried out in line with a principle of communicativeness. In our context, such a principle imposes two requirements. It requires, first, that the act of vandalism conveys a message that is directed at the tainted commemoration. When vandalism is communicative in this sense, it avoids the criticism that the vandals are ignorant. The second requirement is that the act of vandalism needs to be non-evasive. The vandal should be willing to articulate their commitments and reasons for their actions to others within their community. In practical terms, it means that activists must take public responsibility for their acts of vandalism, in the sense of admitting to their vandalism. When acts of vandalism are communicative in this sense, they also mitigate the intuitive negative judgement about vandals.
 
The third worry may be mitigated if the vandal receives support from other activists and organisations that are representative of at least those members of oppressed groups whose self-respect are at stake. This may be in the form of public statements, released after the fact of vandalism, in support of the message that the act conveys. When these statements are made public, we leave little doubt about the representativeness of the vandals’ views. Uncertainties about the representativeness of the vandals’ views may be further mitigated, if local authorities permit the tainted commemoration to stay vandalised, rather than attempt to restore it to its original state.
 
The final worry concerns the illegality of vandalism. Here, it is important to note that the vandalism of tainted commemorations need not be illegal. The possibility is open that the authorities could invite representative members of formerly oppressed groups to vandalise such commemorations as part of some event (either of commemoration or reparation). The vandalism of tainted commemorations during such events would then not be illegal. While this raises worries about the co-option of a form of resistance, the vandalised commemoration and the participation of the authorities would still be effective as a response which secures self-respect. Or, even more radically, the authorities could abolish or revise existing legislation (concerning the preservation of such commemorations, or the defacement of public property) that renders the vandalism of (some) tainted commemorations illegal. More broadly, the worry that the vandalism of tainted commemorations is illegal, and thus to be avoided, implicitly assumes that the broader contexts in which our political resistance occurs are fixed. We do not need to go along with this assumption.
 
Of course, the likelihood that the authorities will take these options is low, and we need to take seriously the worry about the illegality of vandalism. Here, we may note that the duty to obey the law is not always overriding. There are many situations in which individuals can permissibly break the law or even have a duty to do so. In our context, it appears that the duty to obey the law (by not vandalising a tainted commemoration) may be overridden when there are no other effective responses to tainted commemorations that would satisfy the demands of both activists and preservationists. The conditionality of this argument for vandalism reflects our considered judgement that law-breaking actions should not be taken unless activists have run out of fruitful legal options.
 
To sum up, vandalism secures some important goals—it mitigates (or eliminates) the threat to the self-respect of members of minority groups, and promotes deeper historical understanding. Because of this, vandalism can, in principle, satisfy proponents of the activist and preservationist views. Additionally, insofar as vandalism succeeds in securing these goals, we have reason to regard it as a permanent, rather than a merely transitionary, response to tainted commemorations. It is also possible for us, with some further work, to extend this defence of the vandalism of tainted commemorations, to our relationships with all public artefacts or public spaces more generally. I undertake such an extension, and defend its plausibility, elsewhere.
 


[1] Damien Gayle and Nadia Khomami, ‘Cecil Rhodes Statue Row: Chris Patten Tells Students to Embrace Freedom of Thought’, Guardian, January 13, 2016.

[2] Mary Beard, ‘Cecil Rhodes and Oriel College, Oxford’, Times Literary Supplement, 2015, https://www.the-tls.co.uk/cecil-rhodes-and-oriel-college-oxford/.

[3] David Cannadine, ‘Introduction’, in Dethroning Historical Reputations: Universities, Museums and the Commemoration of Benefactors, eds. Jill Pellew and Lawrence Goldman (London: Institute of Historical Research, 2018), pp. 1–14.

[4] Will Hutton, ‘Cecil Rhodes Was a Racist, but You Cannot Readily Expunge Him from History’, Guardian, December 20, 2015.

[5] Javier Espinoza, ‘“Rhodesgate”: Campaign to Remove Rhodes Statue “Is like Isil’s Destruction of Antiques”, Says Oxford Don,’ Daily Telegraph, December 22, 2015.

[6] There are two questions about such a reconstruction. First, is remembering the actions or beliefs of such “ordinary” British citizens simply the other side of the same coin of remembering the actions or beliefs of those people of Rhodes’ times who were critical of, or resisted, his endeavours? Second—and assuming that the answer to the previous question is in the affirmative—does that support the preservation of tainted commemorations (rather than the establishment of new ones)? Our potential resistance to answering these questions in the affirmative may indicate a need for an alternative reconstruction of the preservationist view. Whether such a view accurately captures the preservationists’ central concerns is beyond the scope of this essay to consider.

Recent years have seen successive waves of “statue wars”[1]—intense controversies over the visible traces of European colonialism in built commemorative landscapes. The most recent wave of controversies about so-called “tainted” monuments[2]—monuments that honour historical figures who have played an ignominious role in histories of slavery, colonialism, and racism—occurred during the global wave of Black Lives Matter protests that started in reaction to the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020. During a summer of global discontent, demonstrators famously toppled statues of Jefferson Davis (Richmond, Virginia), and Edward Colston (Bristol), beheaded a Columbus statue (Boston), and vandalised statues of King Leopold II (Antwerp, Brussels, Ghent), Otto von Bismarck (Hamburg), Winston Churchill (London), and James Cook (Melbourne), to name just a few examples.

These spectacular events sparked heated public debates about the appropriateness and permissibility of defacing, altering, or permanently removing “contested heritage”.[3] These public debates have also led to a renewed interest in questions of contested monuments and commemoration in political theory and political philosophy.[4] So far, however, this emergent debate has focused primarily on normative questions about the wrong of tainted commemorations and the permissibility of defacing, altering, or removing monuments.[5] Engagement with the political-sociological and aesthetic dimensions of monuments, monumentality, and commemoration, including their relationship to political ideologies and subjectivities, by contrast, has remained relatively thin in recent debates about commemoration and contested monuments in political theory. This means that crucial questions about the role of commemorative landscapes in political life and in the constitution of political subjectivities have remained underexplored. For example, there has been only a relatively superficial reconstruction of the ideological stakes of the debate over the fate of contested colonial monuments. Similarly, while there have been several powerful defences of vandalising and defacing “tainted commemorations,”[6] the literature in political theory and political philosophy has not yet engaged fully with innovative aesthetic strategies for contesting colonial monuments through decolonising artistic practices.

This series, Contested Memory, Contesting Monuments, seeks to curate a space in which emergent debates about monuments and commemoration in political theory can be in conversation with debates about the politics of the built commemorative landscape in political science, anthropology, sociology, and area studies that explore political-sociological and aesthetic dimensions of monuments and commemoration. Importantly, it also seeks to facilitate a direct exchange of perspectives between scholars of monuments and commemoration in the academy, on the one hand, and memory activists and artists who are actively involved in today’s politics of memory and monuments, on the other.

This is intended to be an open-ended series but we start with a wide-ranging series of inaugural contributions. In the first contribution to the series, Moira O’Shea traces the history of contesting Confederate monuments in the US and reflects on our relationship to the past. Upcoming contributions include an interview with Yolanda Gutierrez, a Mexican-German performance artist, and the founder of Bismarck Dekolonial, in which we discuss the realities of attempting to decolonise the built environment through artistic interventions; Chong-Ming Lim’s exploration of vandalising tainted commemorations; Sasha Lleshaj’s Sound Monuments, which reflects on very idea of monumentality, and connects struggles over ‘contested heritage’ to political contestations of ‘soundscapes’; and Tania Islas Weinstein and Agnes Mondragón analyses of the political uses and abuses of public art in contemporary Mexican politics.



[1] Mary Beard, "Statue Wars," Times Literary Supplement, 13.06.2020 2015.

[2] Chong‐Ming Lim, "Vandalizing Tainted Commemorations," Philosophy & Public Affairs 48, no. 2 (2020).

[3] Joanna Burch-Brown, "Should Slavery's Statues Be Preserved? On Transitional Justice and Contested Heritage," Journal of Applied Philosophy 39 no. 5 (2022).

[4] Helen Frowe, "The Duty to Remove Statues of Wrongdoers," Journal of Practical Ethics 7, no. 3 (2019); Johannes Schulz, "Must Rhodes Fall? The Significance of Commemoration in the Struggle for Relations of Respect," Journal of Political Philosophy 27, no. 2 (2019); Burch-Brown, "Should Slavery's Statues Be Preserved? On Transitional Justice and Contested Heritage."; Lim, "Vandalizing Tainted Commemorations."; Macalester Bell, "Against Simple Removal: A Defence of Defacement as a Response to Racist Monuments," Journal of Applied Philosophy 39 no. 5 (2021).

[5] Daniel Abrahams, "Statues, History, and Identity: How Bad Public History Statues Wrong," Journal of the American Philosophical Association, First View , pp. 1 - 15 (2022).

[6] Bell, "Against Simple Removal: A Defence of Defacement as a Response to Racist Monuments."; Ten-Herng Lai, "Political Vandalism as Counter-Speech: A Defense of Defacing and Destroying Tainted Monuments," European Journal of Philosophy 28, no. 3 (2020); Lim, "Vandalizing Tainted Commemorations."

It has become customary to refer, in something like an air of hushed excitement, to a ‘renaissance in ideology studies’ that has taken place over the last quarter-century. Since the 1990s, so this narrative goes, ideology has emerged from under the long shadows of Marxism, the turn to scientism, the ‘end of ideology’, the ever-narrower self-reinforcing methodological spirals of comparative politics and cultural theory, to once again become a legitimate object of analysis in social research. Not only that, but in a way that it has never previously enjoyed, ideology has begun to move from a topic--one among many—in political philosophy, the history of ideas, social psychology, or sociological theory, to an independent area of study in its own right. The ‘renaissance’ in the study of ideology and ideologies has, in reality, been the ‘naissance’ of ideology studies as a discrete subfield.
​
Insofar as this ‘re/naissance’ has taken place, it has been in significant part due to the efforts of a handful of key theorists, who have battled to carve out a space for ideology and ideologies in university departments, research centres, and academic journals. One such theorist is Michael Freeden, who in the early 1990s developed the key underlying framework for the morphological school of ideology analysis. Based at the University of Oxford, then the University of Nottingham and the School of Oriental and African Studies, Freeden has played a vital role in the establishment and subsequent expansion of ideology studies through his long tenure as Editor of the Journal of Political Ideologies.

In this capacity, he stewarded the journal from its inaugural issue in January 1996, coinciding roughly with France’s final nuclear test in the Pacific, Germany’s first Holocaust Remembrance Day, the release of the programming language Java and the first Motorola ‘flip phone’, as well as the immediate aftermath of the Bosnian War, until September 2020, deep in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, which saw the eruption of record-breaking wildfires across the U.S. Pacific coast, the burning of Europe’s largest refugee camp on Lesbos, the declaration by the government of Barbados to remove the monarchy and become a republic, and the outbreak of renewed border conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh.

The collection of essays in Ideology Studies gathers together the majority of the editorials that Freeden wrote during the 25 years he spent at the helm of the Journal of Political Ideologies, lightly reframed into 17 substantive chapters. The chapters are grouped together into four themes that cross-cut the exact chronology of the original editorials: ‘Staking out the macro-agenda’ on what it means to study ideology and ideologies; ‘Unfolding vistas and paradigms’, covering some of the main evolving trends in ideology studies and political theory; ‘Boundaries and intersections’ on the thematic overlaps and exchanges between ideology studies and neighbouring subfields; and ‘Lived ideology’, working through some case-studies of how ideology works in society.

As Freeden acknowledges at the start of the book, these thematic division perform a dual function. They are an attempt to corral otherwise disparate “contextualised, space and time bound, reactions to events, problems, and epistemological transformations” into an overarching meta-analytic framework of ‘what has been going on’ in ideology studies since the mid-to-late 1990s. But they are also “clues to some of the concerns closest to [Freeden’s] heart” as a seminal ideology theorist, as not just observer but participant in ideology studies’ emergence.

To put it morphologically, this collection advances—by a mixture of implicit gestures and explicit statements—our understanding of the core concepts that comprise ‘Freedenism’ as a methodological outlook, as a metatheoretical map with which to navigate ideology and ideologies as objects of research. Yet even here, we already have to draw a careful distinction between several Freedenisms, of which this is only one. The chapters in this volume, even those that deal with substantive questions such as Brexit, the Afghanistan war, ‘cancel culture’, or ‘fake news’, only ever show Freeden in interpretive, ideology-theoretic mode. This is the Freeden of Ideologies and Political Theory (1996), The Political Theory of Political Thinking (2013), and to a lesser extent of Concealed Silences and Inaudible Voices in Political Thinking (2022): the conceptual morphologist, the syncretic, the diagnostician.

Yet there is another side of Freeden’s work, another branch of Freedenism, that lies far more subdued in this volume. This is the Freeden who embraces more overtly his particular commitment to liberalism, not just in intellectual-historical interpretive mode, but also in ideological, critical or prescriptive mode: the Freeden of The New Liberalism (1978), Liberalism Divided (1986), Rights (1991), and Liberal Languages (2005). Even in his chapter on ‘Liberalism in the limelight’ as part of this collection, which takes as its starting-point the difficulties liberals face in adequately theorising the context and effects of resurgent fascism, exemplified by then-British National Party leader Nick Griffin’s infamous appearance on BBC’s Question Time in October 2009, Freeden’s own liberal commitments remain firmly in the background.

This divide between ‘Freeden the morphologist’ and ‘Freeden the liberal’ reflects one of Freeden’s firmly-held commitments about what ideology studies is, illuminated by a clear description of what it is not. “Ideology studies—unlike their subject-matter—do not prescribe solutions.” Methodological theory is not substantive philosophy, ‘talking about’ is not the same thing as ‘saying that’. In order to preserve its uniqueness and independence as a subfield, ideology studies has to exercise stringent rigour to avoid betraying researchers’ ideological commitments. It has to stay always at one stage of remove: what I have elsewhere called ‘ideologology’, rather than ideology simpliciter.

This is not least a profoundly strategic necessity, to preserve the legitimacy of the fragile niche that ideology researchers have carved out for themselves among their peers in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Part of the uphill struggle that ideology studies has faced is not just against the often instinctive view that ideology is (to put it kindly) not a very good thing, but also against far-reaching scepticism that it is possible to make sufficient space for a diagnostic or historical treatment of ideology that does not just immediately bleed into critique or prescription.

Freeden is convinced it is both possible and necessary to do exactly that. “[S]tudents of ideology should be exempted from an expectation to superimpose their personal recommendations on their findings. … They do not have an advocacy role. … [T]heirs is a different project, located in another part of a verdant wood … [that] demands of ideology students an entirely different set of skills.” What is this project? To this, Freeden’s answer is expressed in language that remains unwaveringly similar to that of his earliest interventions in ideology theory: “to explore, map, analyse, and enlarge” the conceptual frameworks we all use to make sense of what is going on in society. Not just the complex, nuanced philosophies of the elite specialist “professional formulators of ideas” but also the mass vernacular thinking of “laypeople, whether well thought-out or casual and under-formulated”. The thinking that is—not the thinking that was (history of ideas) or should be (ethics).

Ideology studies in this independent form is needed precisely because it fills a niche of vital, salutary realism that has been bizarrely bypassed in the construction of the accepted boundaries of social theory and social science. Ideology studies does what other areas of social research do all too rarely: take ideas and the connections between them seriously as objects of study on their own terms.

But it is not enough to simply affirm and celebrate the fact that ideology studies has been broadly successful in gaining a “permanent, respected, and integrated” place in academic social research. What ideology studies has begun to do, and what Freeden emphasises in some of the key chapters of Ideology Studies, is that ideology studies should now have the confidence to ask: where next? One of the most profound achievements of ideology studies, for Freeden, is to shift understandings of ideology away from “ideational products and arguments” towards the “complex cluster of practices that can be gathered under the container term ‘political thinking’.” Ideas, as combined and arranged into ideologies, do not just exist at the level of abstract universals, but also at the level of particular manifestations. Pace the traditional biases of political philosophy, all of these levels are, and of right ought to be, fair game for ideology analysis proper.

Freeden presents this broad orientation towards ideas as well as the “shared identity and action patterns of human communities” that these ideas fashion as an anti-Kantian move, a calling into question of rigid distinctions between theory and practice. The future-facing challenge that Freeden poses to the subdiscipline is how to “unpack and decide what we see and hear when human beings express and conduct themselves in political terms”. Or, to put it differently, to dig more assiduously into what happens when ideology filters through from thinking into behaviour.

Freeden frames the immediate next task for ideology studies as that of “relaxing ideology’s link with logocentrism”. For him, this includes “public rites”, “the body-language and conduct of people in positions of authority”, metaphors and tropes, the role of transmission media, “visual imagery” such as architecture and “political telecasts”, and the emotional content of language and memes—every possible form of ideological conformity and non-conformity that belongs to what he describes, evidently led by his recent focus on silence, as “non-verbal performativity”.

With that, Freeden has set ideology studies in general, and morphological analysis in particular, on the path of gradually moving beyond exclusively seeing ideology in conceptual terms. Certainly, he remains committed to “[a]dopting the ‘political concept’ as the basic unit of the language of ideology”. Yet he recognises that bridging the false Kantian divide between theory and practice entails broadening this language to include terms that articulate not just the abstract mental content of ideological concepts but also their concrete physical, physiological manifestations. What remains less clear, however, is whether this broadened language also needs to be accompanied by changing or expanding what ideology sees as the ‘basic units’ of ideology analysis: concepts, yes, but alongside them also… what? Elements? Phenomena? Realisations?

At the same time, while this certainly widens the terms of reference of ideology studies beyond the purely conceptual, it still implicitly treats the ideational aspect of ideology as primary. There is more to the social implementation, embedding, or entrenchment of ideas and ideology than communication, however generously defined. What is slightly missing is a recognition of just how deeply ideology percolates into the social reality we perceive around us, well beyond anything that could be classed as communication or discourse: our mental and physical outlooks, our routines and procedures, the groups and institutions we belong to, even the circumstances and events we find ourselves caught up in. While these are certainly implicated in morphological analysis à la Freeden, they appear only insofar as they can be deemed to be (quasi-actively) communicating ideas in a specific, narrower sense, rather than (more passively) representing or manifesting them in a broader way. For Freeden, the logocentrism of ideology studies should be relaxed, but not abolished entirely.

Nevertheless, there is a hidden radicalism contained in Freeden’s aspiration that could be pushed far further than happens in this volume. In addition to the turn against logocentrism, one of the most important contributions that ideology studies can make to the wider study of how ideas work in society is to inveigh against canonicity—especially but not exclusively in the history of ideas. Freeden’s insistence that “[t]he study of ideology will still involve individual thinkers—but as representatives of an ideological genre” is replete with possibilities for novel analysis. Rather than the model of (pale, stale, male) prominent individuals who pushed and remoulded the boundaries of ‘their’ ideologies through their promethean thoughts and herculean actions, ideology studies has the tools to foreground the collective, interactive formation of ideological maps through groups and networks—from diffuse crowds to disciplined cadres. This includes analysis of the cross-cutting publics and counter-publics that lead to dynamics of ideological hegemony and counter-hegemony (bourgeois versus proletarian, patriarchal versus feminist, and so on), and the subaltern narratives (e.g., ‘people’s histories’) that can be told about how societies change over time. But it also means sharpening the focus on ‘vernacular’ thinking and ‘ordinary’ behaviour to look at how ideologies are not just invented but also replicated and perpetuated through our thinking and behaviour in everyday life.

This ‘decanonisation’ mission of ideology studies lends an additional urgency to Freeden’s plea that “the scholarly profile of ideology studies needs to be raised substantially”. For Freeden, this is not just a matter of ensuring ideology theorists do not become complacent about how much they have achieved over the last couple of decades, but also a recognition of how much further there is still to go. To put it brusquely, a lot more ideology theorising is still needed if ideology studies (as part of ‘political studies’) is to catch up “with the parallel bodies of theory available to economics, sociology, psychology, and to the institutional side of political science”. In other words, it is all very well for social researchers who work on ideology to complain (quietly or loudly) that ideology is always the bridesmaid and never the bride—an afterthought in the later weeks of someone else’s syllabus, or in the second- and third-year options in someone else’s degree.

If they want to put ideology front and centre, they (we) will have to put in the hard scholarly graft to grow ideology theory to an appropriate scale and complexity. In part, this means keeping up the gradual process of détente towards “political and ethical philosophy on the one hand, and the history of political thought on the other”. In part, it means deepening the areas of cross-fertilisation between ideology theory and other subfields: Freeden explicitly picks out conceptual history in its Koselleckian vein and the Essex school of discourse theory, as well as theories of emotions and rhetoric. But in part, it also means relying on the exponents of “Marxist theories, critical theory, discourse analysis, attitude studies, and everyday preconceptions” to cease their frowning, obstructive reticence whenever the topic of ideology is mentioned.

The happier news, for Freeden, is that ideology studies conceived as a subfield offers a ready-made “integrated resting point” where all these fractious perspectives can be housed under one roof. Under Freeden’s scrupulously watchful eye, the Journal of Political Ideologies has acted precisely as a pluralistic forum where scholars who study ideology and ideologies can ply their trade, no matter their methodological creed—as long as their centre of gravity is overwhelmingly diagnostic or historical, rather than critical or prescriptive. But that is only half the story. Really constituting ideology studies as a subfield relies on more than “chance encounters”, and needs the emergence of cross-fertilising exchanges and hybrid approaches that start to thread together different ways of theorising ideology into various models of ideology theory. Without that, ideology studies will only remain a hollow umbrella term that describes bits-and-pieces forms of ideology analysis hived off into mutually incommunicative subfields.

Part of this consolidating process will be to thicken the terms of analysis that ideology studies (as opposed to any other subdiscipline) uses to evaluate ideologies. These terms should be autonomous and distinctive, not borrowed from other subfields, which prima facie includes “alter[ing] the assessment criteria of ideological success … from the substantive value-oriented standards political theorists have habitually applied to gauge their ideational produce”. They ought to cover characteristics that are more-or-less unique to ideologies, such as “historical contingency”, “discursive indeterminacy”, “overwhelming detail”, or “interpretative fluidity”—although even within these fairly parsimonious parameters, there is still plenty of room available for evaluative thickening.

Freeden first issued this cri de cœur in 2001, but it remains just as apposite in this reissued form over two decades later. Political theory has tried what essentially amount to theoretical half-measures to achieve something like the criteria shift that Freeden has in mind, in the form of the ‘realist’ turn and the ‘political’ turn—both of which Freeden scrutinises in this volume. But neither effort was truly geared towards modifying how ideology studies relates to its own object of analysis. Rather, they were attempts on the parts of disaffected political theorists who did not typically think of themselves as doing ideology research to come up with ways to combat the perceived ‘overreach’ of ethics into how political theory is done today.

As far as ideology studies itself is concerned, its innovations have (unsurprisingly) tended to track trends in ideologies themselves, from emerging ecological concerns and successive new waves of ideologies of identity, to “fashions and impulses” such as populism and globalism. Of course, new ideological trends will keep coming, and ideology studies will study them, und das ist auch gut so! But the insufficient depth of introspection on the topic of how we evaluate ideologies is one reason why the “journey” of ideology studies is so “slow—and still unfinished”. A key question for ideology studies as it turns to this task is how it maintains its humble, self-aware commitment to pluralism even while many of the objects it studies are relentlessly monistic and self-asserting. How, in other words, we can come up with distinctive criteria of success and failure while holding onto “a tentativeness about [our] own preferred solution and a toleration of many others”.

Besides this, Freeden names a few key areas where ideology studies can afford to delve deeper into the fertile ground it has uncovered over the last few decades. One is a better assessment of the rates at which “the different internal components of an ideology can change … a core usually altering more slowly than the adjacent and perimeter concepts and ideas that encircle it”. Paired with the destabilising and rejuvenating effects of unpredictable social crises on the content of established ideologies, this points towards a greater, more granular micro-level engagement with the moments and processes of rupture, and the essential contestations and decontestations, cooptions and divestments they carry in their wake.

Another area of deeper investigation, modelled on Freeden’s assessment of the “birth pains” of the Journal of Political Ideologies, is the “institutional story” that can be told for the key hubs of ideology research—as well, of course, as the apparatuses or dispositifs that act as sites of ideological production in wider society. In this respect, a ‘sociology of the ideology studies subdiscipline’, including a view on why it was only in the 1990s that it finally began to emerge, fits within the more general sociology of knowledge that has existed in broad alignment with ideology research since the time of Karl Mannheim.

In one respect, however, the question of ‘where next’ remains unanswered by Freeden’s volume—or rather, perhaps, one avenue of ‘where next’ is kept more-or-less resolutely closed. The relationship, or even the virtual equivalence, between ideology and politics remains a core feature of methodological Freedenism, if anything even more firmly delineated than at the start of his tenure at the Journal of Political Ideologies. “[M]y focus advanced from identifying the features of thinking ideologically to those of thinking politically.” It is not that Freeden’s definition of ideology as “a set of ideas, beliefs, opinion, and values that serves to justify, contest, or change the social and political arrangements and processes of a community” has become more overtly politicised. Rather, he has chosen to subordinate it to a more “expansive view of the ubiquitous nature of politics”. “Thinking ideologically” is the same as “thinking about politics”, and so is necessarily “intertwined” with “thinking politically”. On that basis, ideology theory is a form of political theory, ideology studies is a subfield within political studies, and the study of ideologies is the same as the study of (historical or contemporary) political thought.

This dimension of Freeden’s theoretical evolution is arguably the hardest pill to swallow against a societal and intellectual background where unmistakeably ideological dynamics have risen to the fore that sit partly or even wholly in social domains beyond the political. The explosion of (specialist and vernacular) interest in an ideology of ‘neoliberalism’ has uncovered the contestations among proponents of (e.g.) neoclassical, neo-Keynesian, Austrian, Georgist, Marxian, and Sraffian theoretical positions in economic thought that only rarely filter through to the worlds of public policy, electoral democracy, or state administration. The same is true of the running battles between defenders of formalism, originalism, realism, strict constructionism, structuralism, and textualism in legal theory—which, again, have political echoes but are not in themselves primarily political.

While it is doubtless fair and theoretically profitable to highlight the political aspects or effects of these avowedly non-political disagreements, it is unnecessarily flattening to restrict the purview of ideological analysis to only these parts of their societal impact. What is at risk of being lost here is the “social and political arrangements and processes” part of Freeden’s original definition of ideology. Even if we want to retain and pay due respect to the familiar alignment between ideology and politics, the rest of society should at least receive an equal amount of airtime too.

The broader message we should take from Ideology Studies on this point, however, is that politics is back. If the 1990s were the era of the ‘third way’, ‘post-politics’, triangulation ‘beyond left and right’, and other claims to ‘non-ideological’ pragmatism, the 2020s are a time not only of self-evident division and polarisation, but also of an increased appreciation of the role that politics in all its forms (from mass activism to state action and beyond) can play in changing the face of society. In this way, the ‘renaissance of ideology studies’ has accompanied, almost seamlessly in tandem, the steadily rising disenchantment with the ‘end of history’. As history has returned, in the form of perpetual wars, financial stagnation and collapse, ecological disasters, pandemics, and other aspects of a growing ‘polycrisis’, ideology has come back with it, firmly but quietly clasping history by the hand.

In this light, Freeden’s collection of editorials is akin to a chronicle of the journey that ideology and its study has undergone during a key period of ideology studies’ foundation. If ideology studies is, as he argues, still very much a subdiscipline in transition, then this volume represents a considerable milestone on the way to its gradual consolidation. It is a salutary reminder to students and theorists of ideology alike of where we have come from, and where we should go next.

Imagine two societies. In the first, children are separated at birth from their biological parents and raised collectively by specialised educators. These educators, carefully selected for the task, closely observe the children in order to discern their talents, abilities, and dispositions. Based on how well they perform at various tasks and the ease with which they acquire knowledge, the children are then categorised and assigned what is believed to be their proper place in society. Those who are particularly musically gifted are given the instruments, instructors, and all the conditions they need to become musicians. The ones who are thought to show a great love of truth and distinct reasoning abilities are raised to become the leaders of that society. The desires and wishes of each individual child are irrelevant to this allocation. Nevertheless, most are content with this arrangement because they are taught and come to believe that they are all brothers and sisters who must serve their community by fulfilling their natural, preordained role. The society is just as long everyone contributes to it by minding their business and not interfering in that of others.[1]

In the second society, children are raised in private, nuclear families. The unchosen circumstances of their birth, including who their parents are, where they were born, and their class, race, and gender status shape their life paths, often to a significant extent. From the beginning, their chances of becoming a musician, a politician, an academic, or a service worker are shaped by various factors beyond their control and irrelevant from the perspective of their ability to fulfil such roles. If their parents are highly educated and wealthy, they are much more likely to receive an education that will allow them to occupy a well-compensated and highly respected position. By contrast, if their parents live in a poor, perhaps racially segregated area, the educational and professional paths in fact available to them will be severely limited. Many people are content with this arrangement because they are taught that the competition is fair—opportunities are by law equally open to all those individuals willing and able to seize them, regardless of who they are and to whom they were born. According to the dominant ideology, accidents of birth can be corrected through hard work, which will allow everyone to ‘rise’ as far as their talents take them.[2]

Which of these is a meritocracy? Surely, the first society seems to be governed by merit—each task and role is fulfilled by the person best suited for it. Show yourself to have a keen eye for the visual arts and all the resources to become a great painter or sculptor will be placed at your disposal. Nobody will have a better chance than you at becoming one—it does not matter that they really want to try their luck at painting (perhaps much more than you), that their biological parents were artists, or that they could have afforded tuition at the best art school. That person will only become a painter if the teachers discern that same talent in them. Otherwise, they will be assigned a different task, through which they can best contribute to society. No drop of talent will be wasted.

The second society, which much more closely resembles our own, also seems to be meritocratic, but in a different respect. Regardless of any natural disposition or proclivity, there is no legal barrier to you becoming a visual artist. If you start painting and you are appreciated by other artists or critics, or have success selling your art, then you are free to be a painter. Nobody can tell you that you have no business creating visual art because your talents lie elsewhere and are being wasted. Nor can anyone accuse you of squandering society’s resources in becoming a visual artist when so many others are or would have been much better at this task—the choice to compete with you to make their living in the same fashion was open to them.

In my view, both of these social arrangements can be called meritocracies because the concept of ‘meritocracy’ is far more open-ended than its proponents and critics have so far recognised. Rather than having a standalone meaning, meritocracy is always reliant upon other values and ideals for what a good human life and a good society look like, which can vary dramatically.

To begin with, we should distinguish between the principle of merit and a social, economic, and political arrangement we call a meritocracy. Merit is a principle according to which rewards, positions, and goods are allocated to particular persons on the basis of desert—as a result of certain qualities, feats, or achievements. Both the rewards and the rewarded traits vary in accordance with context—the team who wins the Premier League is awarded a few dozen million pounds and a prestigious trophy, while the winner of my friends’ Fantasy PL Mini-League gets a kit of their choice. But not every context in which judgments of merit are made and rewards allocated on their basis is a meritocracy. A mother might give a treat to the child who is most well-behaved at the doctor, but that does not make the family a meritocracy. For this reason, we should reserve the label ‘meritocracy’ only for those social and political communities and institutions in which goods are primarily or exclusively distributed on the basis of merit.

Where does this leave our current debates and controversies about merit and meritocracy? Some social and political thinkers argue that most contemporary societies are not, nor have they ever historically been, meritocracies.[3] The implication of this view is that ‘true’ or ‘real’ meritocracy would have certain political, economic, and institutional features that are absent from our existing and past arrangements. Other thinkers have articulated trenchant critiques of merit and meritocracy, discussing the “tyranny” of merit and meritocracy, the “meritocracy trap”, the “meritocracy myth” and even the “haunting spectre of meritocracy”.[4] The latter argue that our meritocratic arrangements are deeply unjust, harmful for both ‘winners’ and ‘losers’, and that ideologies of merit often function to obscure these realities and justify our social, economic, and political institutions. Elite higher education institutions in the US and UK have been the targets of both types of criticisms. While some have called out the spurious nature of elite universities’ claim that admission is exclusively or even primarily merit-based (see the legacy admissions, class and race bias, bribery, and corruption scandals of the past few years), others have focused on the negative effects that the intense competition pre- and post-college admissions have on students’ mental health and general wellbeing, as well as on society writ-large.

Though both types of criticisms are well-founded, I think that they misidentify merit (or the lack thereof) as the culprits. Because of its open-ended nature, merit as a principle necessarily attaches to other values, ideals, and commitments. For example, universities with a liberal arts focus often evaluate the ‘well-roundedness’ of candidates, including their involvement in arts, sports, activism, etc., as a central merit, while research-focused universities pay much more attention to specialised academic merits such as grades and test scores. Thus, what the resulting meritocratic arrangements look like depends on an institution or society’s conception of individuals and their relationship to the collective, how individuals are expected to relate to each other and the larger group, and the purposes of the collective endeavours and coordination efforts. In other words, merit attaches to a social theory, a set of moral, social, and political norms, as well as an ideal of justice and the good life.

Take the first society described above. The principle of merit serves a vision of social life that prioritises the collective good over and above the good of its individual citizens. In order to achieve justice, each person must fulfil the role they are most suited for, regardless of their personal desires, ambitions, and preferences. The influence of factors that are arbitrary and irrelevant from the perspective of justice—such as class, race, or gender—is therefore neutralised to the greatest extent possible. If I can best make a contribution as a cobbler, I will be given all the resources to become one. At the same time, I am prevented by society from being a ‘busybody’ by attempting to become an opera singer. Regardless of my personal fancies and ambitions, I must submit to the judgment of our communal teachers about my talents and abilities. This arrangement of society will of course strike modern sensibilities as extreme in its lack of concern for individual freedom and its assumptions about natural or innate talent. The point of the example is not to defend this social arrangement as an actionable alternative type of meritocracy, but rather to point out that meritocracies exist on a spectrum, varying from this pole to the more familiar one inherent in the second society described.

In the second example I offered, society is supposed to resemble the free market model of ‘careers open to talents’. Merit is subordinated to the pursuit of private profit within capitalism, as opposed to a vision of the collective good. Judgments about the value of an elementary school teacher’s contribution to society, as compared to a hedge fund manager, are determined by market forces.[5] The social theory is one of extreme individualism and society is not seen as anything more than an aggregate of people, each of them pursuing their interests. Unlike the first example, there is no sense of a collective vision of justice that individuals must contribute to. Even though all opportunities are formally open for anyone willing to compete for, they are in fact limited and circumscribed by structural injustices and inequalities.

These two different examples of social arrangements that can plausibly be called meritocracies show us that the concept should not be understood as describing a single unitary system, but rather as a spectrum of social, economic, and political arrangements that take very different forms depending on the values placed at their core. Like many contemporary critics, I recognise the profound injustices and limitations that characterise our contemporary forms of meritocracy. However, unlike them, I do not think the ideal of meritocracy itself is to blame. Nor is the solution to try to make the current system ‘more meritocratic’. By criticising merit itself we are focusing on an empty abstraction, rather than the deeper political commitments that we should be collectively deliberating upon and changing. Somewhere between the two societies I portrayed at the poles of this spectrum, we might find a more just meritocracy.
 


[1] This description is roughly based on Plato’s Ideal City (The Republic, trans. by Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1991).

[2] On the ‘rhetoric of rising’, see Michael Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?, Chapter 3 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020).

[3] See, for example, Stephen McNamee and Robert K. Miller, The Meritocracy Myth (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).

[4] Michael Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020); Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite (Penguin: 2019); Lani Guinier, The Tyranny of the Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015); Kai Yu, The Implementation of Inclusive Education in Beijing: Exorcizing the Haunting Specter of Meritocracy (Lexington Books: 2014).

[5] For a critical analysis of this feature of contemporary meritocracy, see Michael Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? (2020), especially Chapter 5: Success Ethics.

​In an old textbook on populism, the psycho-sociologist Alexandre Dorna described the phenomenon as a 'volcanic eruption': a surge of the repressed impulses, instincts and fantasies of the masses onto the political scene.[1] This analysis is very common today, especially in relation to the so-called 'far-right populisms', such as the governments of Trump, Bolsonaro, or Orbán. We will not be talking here about the fantasies (in a Freudian sense) of which populism would be the political vector, but about those that it expresses in the speaker who speaks about it. What exactly are we saying when we categorise something as 'populist'? It is well known that the word is used more to stigmatise than to designate positively. Its proliferation in public debate over the past decade has been unprecedented: in 2017 the Cambridge Dictionary awarded it 'word of the year'. Its inflation in the public debate points to the undeniable re-emergence of the ‘people’ as political operator, especially since the subprime crisis of 2008. On the extreme right, this resurgence is expressed in xenophobic nativist movements that oppose the national people to immigration and to ethnic and sexual minorities. On the far left, it appears in plebeian movements that oppose the ‘people’ as a democratic subject to a ruling class, judged to be in collusion with neoliberal economic elites, and accused of corrupting democracy. Both renewals emerge in the global political space. While the former may be compatible with a neoliberal economic orientation, as in the cases of Trump and Bolsonaro, the latter is in frontal opposition.
 
The fantasies of populism
 
Contemporary uses of populism, whether they see it as a threat or as a chance to radicalise democracy, assume that both phenomena lie in the same direction; that they are politically and historically univocal. This is the fantasy I am talking about: in the Freudian sense, the main imaginary production by which those who speak of populism today escape from reality. Here, the historical and sociological reality is that the 'people' of the extreme right have very little to do with the 'people' of the far left. Each of us can easily see that their projects, situated on opposite sides of the political spectrum, have more differences than similarities. In spite of this, the majority of studies in political science persist in seeing in these two phenomena some variants of the same reality: populism. This would be anchored in the extremes, which would therefore be strictly comparable in terms of their political use of the ‘people’. With a touch of irony, I call 'populology' the scholarly discourse structured around this thesis, which takes up the old 'horseshoe theory' in French political science.[2] A thesis that seems to describe, in a clear and transparent way, our political actuality in the 21st century. But its simplicity tends to oversimplify it to the point of obscuring its real socio-political dynamics for at least three reasons.
 
The first reason is that the only thing in common between the extreme-right and the far-left 'populists' is nothing other than the opposition between the 'people' and the 'elites'. However, this opposition takes on such different and even opposite meanings in its two ‘variants’ that it is no longer sufficient to qualify something common. The 'people' is an extremely polysemous concept, since classical Greece, where there are about twenty words used to describe it: dèmos or the whole of the citizens, laos or the whole of the individuals sharing a common culture, ethnos or the whole of the members of a clan, genos or the whole of the individuals sharing a common ancestor, hoi polloi (‘the most numerous’) or the social majority of a population, ochlos or the people in tumult, ekklesia or the assembled people, etc.
 
Each of these terms designated this intangible and ineffable entity that was the ‘people’, based on a specific property or operation that it is supposed to perform in the polis. This definitional difficulty has been further complicated by modern political ideologies, all of which have more or less adopted this central word of democratic modernity. This is why the term is now invoked to designate political projects that have more differences than similarities between the extreme right and the radical left. Unless we consider, as the vast majority of contemporary theorists of populism do, that it is an essentially discursive phenomenon. That it is therefore extremely plastic, reflecting the emptiness of the word ‘people’ and the appeals that invoke it. But are the affects and political behaviours that these populist appeals aggregate really comparable? In reality, if populism is discursive by nature, all politics is discursive; in the same way, liberalism would be a political discourse centered on the word 'freedom', which is also fundamentally ambiguous. Would we then be ready to assert that all political actors who have claimed or are claiming today 'freedom' against a regime that deprives them of it, whatever the political project defended, are comparable? Are we ready to compare feminists, socialists, Berlusconi, the Austrian FPÖ, and so many others? We should recognise that almost all the political phenomena of our modernity are 'liberal' in this sense. Just as today we end up thinking that everything is potentially populist, when we talk about the 'people' against the 'elites'.
 
The second reason is that behind this idea that populism refers to any appeal to the ‘people’, we are in fact confusing distinct political phenomena: social movements, such as Occupy Wall Street, the Indignados or the Gilets jaunes, all structured by the opposition ‘people vs. elites’; political organisations, such as the Rassemblement national, Podemos, and the Labour-affiliated group Momentum, all calling for the ‘people’ against the establishment; modes of appealing to the electorate by the ruling class, more or less demagogic, such as those of Silvio Berlusconi, Nigel Farage, or Donald Trump; finally, political regimes based on the principle of the embodiment of the people by the Head of State, such as those of Erdogan, Putin, or Orbán. These phenomena are ontologically heterogeneous. Here the concept of populism is more confusing than elucidating, because it leads to abandon more precise historical concepts, such as demagogy, neo- or post-fascism, Bonapartism, and authoritarianism, in favour of a vague and fuzzy word. In other terms, there is more in common between authoritarian regimes, whatever their modes of legitimation, than between an authoritarian regime claiming to represent the people against corrupt elites, and a social movement claiming to constitute one against the ruling elites. Similarly, if populism describes modes of appealing to the electorate based on proximity, illusion, and overpromising, it would be more correct to speak of demagogy; it would then be necessary to question the reasons for its rise in contemporary political communication, as much among the establishment parties as among the anti-establishment ones.
 
The third reason is that behind the idea that populism is a plastic discursive construction, there is a tendency to confuse positive and value judgements. The ‘people’, like all our political terms, is a controversial normative word: as a synonym for collective sovereignty, it can be seen as the quintessence of democracy, or as a symbol of an oppressive totality, representing a threat to individual freedoms. If we do not empirically observe the concrete practices that this 'people' produces in the social space, we can be led to take our own value-judgments about 'the people' as science. Depending on the different ways of defining democracy (this concept which is also inseparably descriptive and normative), one will thus make a different case for populism.[3] If, like Jan-Werner Müller, we define democracy as a procedural horizon for safeguarding individual liberties, the 'people' inevitably becomes suspect, both in the political discourse of the extreme right and the far left.[4] If, like Chantal Mouffe, we define democracy as an agonistic horizon of conflictuality, the ‘people’ becomes the very quintessence of the democratic dynamic, because it is always constructed by opposing groups claiming democracy against the elites.[5] Thus, on Müller's side, we lose sight of certain emancipatory uses of the ‘people’, which can radicalise a democracy conceived in a strictly procedural way. But on Mouffe's side, we lose sight of the fact that certain conflictual constructions of the ‘people’ are actually anti-democratic, such as those proposed by the neo-Nazi movement FPÖ in Austria or by the ‘Golden Dawn’ in Greece, because they challenge the liberal foundations of our democracies.
 
A new genetic approach
 
In fact, before we can even discuss whether populism is progressive or regressive for our democracies, we need to agree on what we are talking about. We need to clear up the many ambiguities to which contemporary uses of populism give rise: ambiguities in the classification and in the comparison that is proposed. In reality, we still do not know what populism is: not only do we not really know how to explain it, but we continue to disagree, among scholars, on what it encompasses empirically.
 
Despite the huge inflation of books and articles on the subject, we are still at the first steps of a scientific method. This makes the enterprise questionable for those who consciously choose not to use the concept. But it also makes it exciting and thrilling for those who take the problems posed by the concept seriously, seeking new solutions to its enigma. I propose a new 'genetic' approach, which consists in going back to the founding experiences of populism: the Russian narodnichestvo (between 1840 and 1880), the American People's Party (at the end of the 19th century) and the national-popular regimes in Latin America (between 1930 and 1960).[6] Why them and not others? Why this return to the past when populism is such a current phenomenon? For one simple reason: these three historical experiences are defined by the entire scientific community as populist; they do not carry the ambiguities of what is too broadly called populism today. It is therefore a solid starting point for a new analysis. This is all the more true since historical distance makes it possible to look at current events in a more complex way. If there is one lesson of social sciences since Max Weber, it is this: we must analyse the present from the past, and not the opposite. Yet, concerning populism, we often move between presentism (the idea of the radical newness of our present, disjointed from the past) and anachronism (the distorted reading of past populisms from our present).
 
By comparing these founding experiences of populism, we obtain an ideal type: in the sense of Max Weber, a 'logical utopia' resulting from the stylisation of reality and the deliberate accentuation of certain features, which help to understand empirical reality by comparison with the model. The first recurring feature, which will be accentuated, is that populism always appears within the crisis of governments claiming to be legitimated by the people, but excluding them socially, economically, and politically.
 
The second recurring feature is that populism is structured by the opposition between the 'people' and the 'elite', but it gives an ideologically singular interpretation of this opposition, which defies any comparison between the far left and the extreme right. The 'people' appears as the name of a utopia: a democracy restored to its sovereign subject, involved in a dynamic of radicalisation of both freedom and equality. Populist democracy is conceived against the reduction of democracy to representative governments: an ‘elective aristocracy’ that is always potentially oligarchic.[7] The 'elite' is the force that opposes this project of founding a populist democracy. The 'people' and the 'elite' thus do not define two concrete social groups, but two forces of democratic modernity: the 'people' is associated with the insides, with life and tradition; the 'elite' with the outsides, with reason and modernisation. This idea is central to the writings of the founder of populist ideology, the Russian Alexander Herzen (1812–70), who provided a systematic version of it at about the same time as Marx and Engels were working on the idea of communism. The Russian populists (narodniki), who were to deeply influence Lenin (his brother had been one of them), were convinced that the peasantry, the social majority of the people, could provide the organisational forms on which the future democracy could be built.
 
As a radical political ideology, populism is accompanied by the expression of a certain revolutionary charisma. This is the third recurrent feature of the phenomenon. In the Russian and American cases, this charisma is ‘available’ to the actors of the social movement, who can all aspire to embody the mobilisation: it is an ‘acephalous’ charisma. When the American farmers created their own party, the People's Party, this charisma was gradually personalised: the party acquired two brilliant charismatic leaders, James B. Weaver and William Jennings Bryan.
 
The latter, a great critic of the financial system of the Gold Standard, deemed responsible for the American social crisis, gave a speech in 1896 with eschatological connotations: the ‘Cross of Gold’ Speech. This young lawyer from Nebraska attacked the idle holders of capital in the ‘great American cities’, accusing them of strangling the working classes and draining the country's ‘broad and fertile prairies’. ‘The humblest citizen in all the land’, he said, ‘when clad in the armor of a righteous cause, is stronger than all the whole hosts of error that they can bring. I come to speak to you in defense of a cause as holy as the cause of liberty, the cause of humanity’. ‘You come to us’, he replied to the supporters of the Gold Standard, ‘and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the Gold Standard. I tell you that the great cities rest upon these broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic. But destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country’. ‘If they dare to come out in the open field and defend the Gold Standard as a Good thing’, he concluded, ‘we shall fight them to the uttermost, having behind us the producing masses of the nation and the world. Having behind us the commercial interests and the laboring interests and all the toiling masses, we shall answer their demands for a Gold Standard by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold’.
 
In the Latin American case, populism had powerful charismatic leaders too: Juan Domingo Perón in Argentina, Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico, Getúlio Vargas in Brazil, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in Colombia, Rómulo Betancourt in Venezuela, Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre in Peru, Víctor Paz Estenssoro in Bolivia, Carlos Ibáñez del Campo in Chile.
 
Finally, a last recurring feature of populism is the socially heterogeneous nature of the mobilisations. They involve alliances between impoverished working classes and middle classes made precarious by the economic crisis: they all share the view that the ruling class is disconnected from the needs of the population's majority. Moreover, these mobilisations have no real class basis: they bring together different democratic causes carried by ‘subaltern groups’ in the sense of Antonio Gramsci, whose relations of domination go from class, to gender, to race.[8]
 
Populism is therefore an ideology of crisis. It appears in a context of socio-economic crisis which becomes a legitimacy crisis of a government which, claiming to rule in the name of the people, appears collectively as the expression of an oligarchy's interests. Because of this context, populism operates as a crisis phenomenon. Thus, we can speak of 'populist moments' because populism can hardly survive beyond the crisis that institutes it. Despite its mobilising potential, because of the revolutionary charisma it brings to the stage and its capacity to federate several social demands, it is not sustainable. Why is this so?
 
The Latin American case provides some answers to this tricky problem. From the outset, it is difficult to achieve a programme as ambitious and vague as founding a radical democracy. On the one hand, such a programme should cover all spheres of social life, from culture to education, employment, citizenship. Let's think of Perón's Partido Justicialista, founded in 1946 and charged with democratising Argentinian society in the areas of education, university, civic and social rights, work and social inequalities, gender, culture ... A project that can lead to many disappointments among the mobilised popular base once populism is in power. The radical wing of Peronism—the Montoneros—and the communist left constantly deplore public policies that do not meet the democratic expectations of the Argentinian people. On the other hand, such a maximalist project runs the risk of removing all obstacles to State intervention in society: an intervention which, adorned with the noble objective of radicalising democracy, may end up subjecting to it the preservation of certain freedoms, such as those of the press or the unions.
 
In short, as much as populism is useful and necessary as a protest ideology, it is not very effective as an ideology in power. This is all the more the case because, by giving a central place to charisma, it leads, in the conditions of the organised competition for power, to a strong personalism. The mobilisation's leader who becomes the charismatic Head of State tends to introduce into populism a strongly vertical dimension, which is opposed to the horizontality of the social movement. The opposition between the 'people' and the 'elite' also tends to change once it is transformed into an ideology of public action: from a radically democratic opposition (deepening democracy by injecting more popular sovereignty), it tends to polarise society between 'friends' of the people and 'friends' of the elite. During my fieldwork in Venezuela (2007-11), one of the countries of the populist revival in the twenty-first century, I was confronted daily with the harmful effects of such polarisation, which ultimately undermines democratic communication.[9] In institutional politics as well as in ordinary life, people had stopped debating, and instead fought each other in the name of imaginary plots attributed to one part of society against the other. This logic, combined with personalism and statism, finally legitimated an authoritarian turn within the State that began in 2005 and was reinforced with Nicolas Maduro's election.
 
What is left of populism?
 
As the Latin American case shows, this is the main problem with populism in power: an ideology that aims to re-found or radicalise democracy quickly comes into conflict with the logic of the State. This reflection is useful when considering what to do with populism today.
 
What remains of this historical ideology? What is left is clearly left-wing populism. From an ideological point of view, the so-called 'right-wing populism' refers to a completely different historical matrix: that of ethnic nationalism (or nativism), with strong antisemitic connotations, which was born in Europe at the end of the 19th century, irrigated the fascist movements, and was rebuilt in the 1980s against the migratory globalisation and the emancipatory struggles of the 1970s. Left-wing populism, by contrast, emerged in Europe and the United States after the Latin American ‘left turn’ in a similar context to that of past populisms: a socio-economic crisis, the subprime crisis, which revealed the disconnection of neoliberal elites from the social needs of the majority. The democratic socialism of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Labour Momentum, Podemos, the Five Star Movement, Syriza, La France insoumise: they have canalised the new populist mobilisations.
 
For those of them that have come to power, the same structural problems of Latin American populisms can be observed, even if the danger of an out-of-control statism is less pronounced there, due to the smaller role of military elites in the socio-historical construction of States. Like past populisms, populisms of our time are very ephemeral: none of them are in the same place as they were three years ago. The concessions made to the establishment have almost erased some of them from the electoral map, like Syriza. All of them have strong internal cleavages. One is the opposition between a ‘pragmatist’ wing and a ‘radical’ wing, as in the Italian Five Star Movement during Mario Draghi's government. The other is the split between 'populist strategy' and 'leftist strategy', as in Podemos (between Íñigo Errejón and Pablo Iglesias) and La France insomise (between Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Clémentine Autain). In short, populism still appears as a singular political moment; a moment that already seems, in part, to be behind us. If the populist moment of 2008 has closed, with the disappointments that populist parties in power have generated in their falling electorates, another one may arise in the future.
 
Two points should then be borne in mind. Firstly, populism does not remain the same between the destituting, contesting phase and the reinstituting phase in power; it changes politically. It is therefore necessary to control this mutation. Secondly, it is becoming urgent to separate the destiny of the extreme right and that of the radical left: the idea that there would be a populist dynamic common to both prevents us from thinking about the necessary renewal of a left-wing populism. On the contrary, this idea causes systematic haemorrhaging of left-wing voters who see in a supposedly common strategy with the extreme right a legitimate reason for disgust. Thinking about a left-wing populism for the years to come can only be done on the basis of these two analytical and strategic observations.

​

[1] Alexandre Dorna, Le populisme (Paris : PUF, 1999).

[2] Federico Tarragoni, L’esprit démocratique du populisme. Une nouvelle analyse sociologique (Paris : La Découverte, 2019). On the 'horseshoe theory', see Jean-Pierre Faye, Le siècle des idéologies (Paris : Press Pocket, 2002). For a critical point of view, cf. Annie Collovald and Brigitte Gaïti (eds), La démocratie aux extrêmes. Sur la radicalisation politique (Paris : La Dispute, 2006).

[3] Quentin Skinner, ‘The Empirical Theorists of Democracy and Their Critics’, Political Theory, 1, Issue 3 (1973), pp. 287-306; John Dunn, Setting the People Free. The Story of Democracy (New York: Atlantic books, 2005).

[4] Jan-Werner Müller, What is Populism? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

[5] Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism (London: Verso, 2018).

[6] Federico Tarragoni, « Populism, an ideology without history? A new genetic approach », Journal of Political Ideologies, 26, Issue 3 (2021). DOI : 10.1080/13569317.2021.1979130.

[7] Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

[8] Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks [25 §4, 1934] (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).

[9] Federico Tarragoni, L’Énigme révolutionnaire (Paris : Les Prairies ordinaires, 2015).

When liberals and libertarians speak of liberty today, they often think of it as ‘negative’, in the sense of being left to our own devices, especially by the government. The distinction between ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ liberty was popularised by Isaiah Berlin, the twentieth century British historian of ideas and philosopher, whose 1958 lecture ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ has made it into a staple of late modern political thought.

Berlin portrayed negative liberty as a liberal political ideal, but he was no libertarian in the American sense of minimal government and anti-welfare state. Some of his libertarian followers have taken the argument further. They have advocated the maximisation of negative liberty and the corresponding minimisation of the state. In popular political discourse, the idealisation of negative liberty has produced a belief, famously articulated by United States President Ronald Reagan, that ‘government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem’.

Surprisingly, however, when the concept of negative liberty first emerged in early modern political thought, it was not conceived as a political ideal. It was more like an anti-ideal. Thomas Hobbes and Jeremy Bentham, the two most important theorists of negative liberty in early modern political thought, both used the negative definition of liberty as a deflationary device, in order to deflate democratic political language.

Hobbes argued that democratic writers were conceptually confused about the meaning of liberty, which led them, in turn, to democratic excess. The Hobbesian definition of liberty as the absence of external impediments was supposed to pour a bucket of cold water on their excessive demands for freedom. Bentham, who popularised the claim that the idea of liberty is ‘negative’, used his negative definition of liberty as an ideological weapon. Writing on the concept of liberty during the American Revolution, he expressed his wish, intended to ‘cut the throat’ of what he believed to be a false and dangerous rhetoric of liberty and rights serving the cause of pro-American ‘democratic fanaticism’. He thought that the pro-American democrats had confused notion of liberty as something ‘positive’ (in the sense of being something real and desirable), and he wanted to rid them of their illusions.[1]

On its road from Bentham to contemporary libertarianism, then, the negative idea of liberty has undergone a curious transformation. It has turned from a deflationary device to a central ideal. How did this happen? This is the historical puzzle that has caught our imagination. We are making the task of addressing it more manageable by revisiting Berlin’s account and fleshing out some of the ideological history underlying it. Two themes in particular, that Berlin’s piece had obscured, deserve examining.

First, the theme of negative liberty and democracy. Negative liberty has served, in different historical moments, as an ideological weapon against radical democracy. But it also points to an important shift in the manner in which the negative conception of liberty has been deployed against radical democracy. Hobbes and Bentham used it as deflationary device against what they saw as the confused demand for excessive freedom from restraint. But from the eighteenth century onwards, Whigs and liberals shifted towards the endorsement of liberty as a moderate liberal ideal, which must be protected from democratic despotism or, in a later phrasing, from ‘totalitarian democracy’.

Second, the late and contingent association of the liberal conception of liberty with the idea of negativity. The liberal tradition was slow to adopt the classical utilitarian argument that the idea of liberty is ‘negative’. It is only towards the mid-twentieth century that several historical contingencies—the disentanglement of liberty from democracy, the rise of ‘positive’ liberty and its association with totalitarianism, and what we describe as ‘the fashion of negativity’ in the twentieth-century interwar years—combined to create ‘negative liberty’ as a central liberal ideal.

Let’s take this a bit more slowly. One way of tracing the history of the negative idea of liberty is to keep our eye on a tradition of Whig and liberal political thought that advocated individual liberty as a moderate ideal. Prior to this tradition, demands for liberty were often associated with radical democratic politics. But in the work of Montesquieu, and in the debates that took place in the context of the American Revolution, liberty was disengaged from democracy and associated with moderation.

The French Revolution exerted crucial influence on the development of an antagonism between individual liberty and democracy. The peculiar circumstance that the Jacobins employed the slogans of liberty while conducting a campaign of systematic violence gave birth to a discourse that placed liberty squarely at the centre of the political map, threatened by both the political left and right. Thus emerged nineteenth-century French liberalism as the centrist ideology of the post-Revolutionary era.

The historical divorce of liberty from radical democratic politics and its transformation into a liberal ideal reached its apex in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution. If previously many radical currents felt themselves generally at ease with the promotion of ‘bourgeois’ freedoms, now under the influence of the Soviet regime the very idea of these freedoms became more and more suspect. This allowed the critics of the leftist regimes to forge the notion of totalitarian democracy and identify it with the revolutionary left. This term—‘totalitarian democracy’—was thus adopted by centrist liberals to describe regimes emerging out of the radical democratic rhetoric of the Bolsheviks. The historical divorce of liberty from radical politics was completed. Liberty was now firmly situated in the sphere of non-revolutionary bourgeois politics.

This schematic account clarifies the historical context for the tendency of Cold War liberals like Berlin to depict liberty as an ideal that faces hostility both from the radical left and from the reactionary right, depicting both extremes as versions of totalitarianism. But it does not explain how the supposed clash between Western democracy and totalitarianism came to be perceived in terms of an opposition between negative and positive liberty.

To understand that part, we looked, first, to the legacy of German Idealist philosophy and its relation to the twentieth-century debates on totalitarianism. It is in Kant and Hegel that we find the idea of ‘positive’ liberty as a conceptually valid and normatively superior idea of freedom. This new understanding of liberty greatly influenced the British Idealists, such as T.H. Green and Bernard Bosanquet, who brought the dialectic of negative and positive liberty into the British philosophical scene.

In the work of some of the younger theorists of new liberalism, such as J.A. Hobson and L.T. Hobhouse, the idea of positive liberty was used in order assign the state the task of removing via social reforms obstacles to the mutual cooperation of harmonious individuals, thus liberating rather than suppressing the spontaneous energies of individuals. But in the work of German romantics such as Adam Müller, liberty was taken to contain a strong conservative element. It espoused the ideal of devotion to a national collective and advocated an increased role of the state in the life of the society and culture.

When this German ‘conservative’ tradition, as Karl Mannheim described it, was supplanted by a movement of conservative revolution, and, in turn, by Nazi totalitarianism, its ‘qualitative’ or ‘ethical’ conception of liberty was coloured in a much more sinister light. Liberal critics such as Karl Popper accused German advocates of positive liberty of substituting the true meaning of liberty with its exact opposite. At the same time, liberal critics began to blur differences between the anti-liberal right and left, so that qualitative liberty began to be ascribed to both. Thinkers such as Rousseau and Marx, whose radical and emancipationist credentials had formerly been beyond doubt, were now associated with the reactionary rejection of liberty.

The critique of positive liberty opened the possibility of a complementary movement: the transformation of negative liberty into a positive ideal. But to complete this latter part of the story, we need one more component, which we have described as ‘the fashion of negativity’.

Philosophically, the interwar years were the period in which the logical positivists and the British realists successfully demolished the influence of philosophical Idealism, and advocated, instead, sceptical modesty. Culturally, the worldview of the post-World War I generation was marked by anxiety, alarm, and even despair. ‘Negative’ carried a tone of sophistication and superiority over pre-War naïveté. In this context, to prefer ‘negative’ over ‘positive’, even while admitting the philosophical power of the ‘positive’, would not appear as rhetorically self-defeating. On the contrary, opponents of ‘negative liberty’ were faulted for sinning against a commonsensical, modest idea of liberty.

This brief account suggests that the tortuous history of negative liberty has led not only to its transformation into a central liberal ideal, but also to an ironic reversal of its original purpose. Hobbes and Bentham defined liberty in negative terms not in order to turn it into an object of ideological worship. On the contrary, they wanted to diffuse the passions aroused by the language of liberty. Ironically, shifting ideological contexts have turned this act of rhetorical diffusion into a magnet for new political passions.



[1] On this, see Yiftah Elazar, ‘Liberty as a Caricature: Bentham’s Antidote to Republicanism’, Journal of the History of Ideas 76(3) (2015), 417–39.

When pursuing the clarification of socialism’s core concepts, according to the methodology advocated by Michael Freeden for the study of political ideologies, equality stands out as one of the undisputed ideas on that complex, variegated, and often quarrelling tradition. The other key concepts or conceptual themes that form the kernel of socialism are, according to Freeden, “the constitutive nature of the human relationship, human welfare as a desirable objective, human nature as active, … and history as the arena of (ultimately) beneficial change”.[1] The method leading to this list involves a particular understanding of political ideologies which differs from the usual approach taken by political theory or political philosophy. It requires a thorough study into the main currents of socialism—not only of the Marxist version—and the specification of the relevant concepts through a process of decontestation. The research aimed at specifying those core concepts is also necessary when it comes to depicting the ideas that comprise the adjacencies and periphery of the socialist ideology. There is a particular difficulty that arises when looking into socialism’s morphology, namely, the fact that socialism is both a critique of capitalist society and also a project of a society yet to be brought about: “unlike conservatism, or even mainstream forms of liberalism, socialism is peculiarly prone to a dual temporal existence. It is centrally founded on a critique of the present, yet significantly projected onto a future of which there is as yet little empirical evidence”.[2] This second aspect demands a “leap of faith and imagination”—to use Freeden’s expression.[3] By and large, the self-awareness of socialism—as an ideology containing at the same time a dominant scientific side and a subordinate utopian (normative) dimension—faded away in the face of different dogmatisms promoted by socialist states. But with the collapse of the socialist bloc, there emerged a need for a revision and updating of key elements of the tradition.
 
Recent scholarship about socialism has largely benefited from the impact of John Rawls’s liberal egalitarianism on several fields of the social sciences and the humanities. After a reckoning of the ethical deficit caused by an extended belief in the scientific prowess of Marxism, a good number of socialist thinkers and activists admitted the need for a normative turn. This is not to deny, of course, the existence of a deep-seated ethical current in Socialism, as it is evident in the works of Eduard Bernstein, R. H. Tawney, G. D. H. Cole, amongst others, but only to highlight the fact that, because of the mainly Marxist anti-moralism, normative work was demeaned and considered powerless in the face of the anticipatory prodigies of historical materialism.  This year will mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of A Theory of Justice,[4] and the shockwaves of Rawlsianism are still highly influential. Discussion of the core concepts of socialism, from a normative perspective, have gained a promising place within academia and also within grassroots organisations. Shortly after the turn of the millennium, Alex Callinicos, in his Anti-capitalist Manifesto, advocated a specific form or socialist democracy that embodies four key values of an anti-systemic program: justice, efficiency, democracy, and sustainability, where justice embraces ideals such as liberty, equality, and solidarity.[5] A recent entry on “Socialism” by Pablo Gilabert and Martin O’Neill for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy singles out equality, democracy, individual freedom, self-realisation, and community or solidarity as paramount values of this tradition.[6] As we can see in these two examples, together with Freeden’s construal, the proposed lists of core concepts do not fully match with each other but have one striking coincidence: equality.
 
This quick exercise seems to support Norberto Bobbio’s famous statement about equality being the Pole Star of the left, as opposed to the anti-egalitarian right. More important, though, is the acknowledgement that values matter to socialism and Marxism in particular, and that it was a shortcoming to eschew any talk of ethical principles, fearfully avoiding a collapse into what Marx and Engels described as petty utopianism. One must only be thankful that this anti-utopianism was not understood as an outright rejection of utopia altogether. So, in defiance of Marx and Engels’s strictures against moral theory, important varieties of moral thinking emerged within the socialist purview, and a strain of ethical socialism came around in the second half of the nineteenth century, paving the way for the post-Rawlsian normative turn. Although the name of Ethical Socialism normally refers to a group of thinkers and activists of the late 1800s in the United Kingdom, it had outstanding representatives in other parts of the world. William Jupp, John Trevor, Thomas Davidson, and Edward Carpenter were key representatives of British ethical socialism. The last two are of particular importance since they were deeply influenced by American Romanticism and immanentism, especially by the works of Henry Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.[7]
 
In the United States, a provincial writer destined to become an almost involuntary political protagonist of the Gilded Age, Edward Bellamy, can be counted as one of the few who, despite the widespread dismissal of utopias, decidedly resorted to this genre—inherent to socialist critique and history—to carry out a double task: to cast a harsh indictment on capitalism as a predatory and unjust system, and to advance a vernacular conception of egalitarianism, which was the most cunning way to bring socialism and Marxist themes to the American public. He was also under the influence of American immanentism, transcendentalism, and the experiences of intentional utopian communities such as the famous Fourierist Brook Farm in Massachusetts. Bellamy’s ideas had a profound impact on the organised labor movement, especially among the Knights of Labor. Eugene Debs, founder of the Socialist Party in the United States, revealed that he became a socialist thanks to Bellamy and even met with the writer in his last days.[8] Daniel De Leon, too, is said to have started his revolutionary career under “Bellamy’s inspiration”;[9] and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the leading feminist activist and writer, was also a prominent member of the Bellamyist movement.[10] John Dewey famously wrote that Bellamy was “A Great American Prophet”, and remarked that “what Uncle Tom’s Cabin was to the anti-slavery movement, Bellamy’s book may well be to the shaping of popular opinion for a new social order”.[11] In short, and in keeping with the morphological approach, I find it plausible to hold that Edward Bellamy’s condemnation of capitalism and the account of the alternative egalitarian society he advocated are founded one a thick idea of equality which, at the same time, involves an outright rejection of the principle of self-ownership. This last rejection, I also sustain, must be either counted as a component of equality as a core idea of socialism or as an adjacent but necessary concept that contributes to making sense of the kind of egalitarianism espoused by Bellamy and, to a large degree, by contemporary egalitarian socialists.
 
It must be noted that the principle of self-ownership, first conceived by John Locke, constitutes the founding tenet of contemporary libertarianism. In its most usual rendition, the principle says that individuals have over themselves the same kind of rights that a master has over a chattel slave and, by implication, those who enjoy self-ownership cannot, as a matter of right, be forced to help others through personal service or any other mandatory scheme of redistribution. Bellamy’s opposition to self-ownership must be understood in the context of his life-long advocacy for egalitarianism, as it is conveyed in his most famous utopian novels: Looking Backward 2000-1887 (1888),[12] and Equality (1897).[13] Such opposition—as I will explain—was founded on the idea of the common ancestry of humankind, on the belief that each person has ha debt to society and past generations; and most importantly, on the notion that it is “fraudulent” to believe that individuals deserve and fully own their natural and social endowments and owe nothing to each other. Looking Backward was one of the most significant literary works in the late 1800s in the United States. It sold millions of copies in a few years and was translated into several languages. The plot, as it normally happens in utopias, is a setting for the development of theoretical propositions. Bellamy uses a time-travelling scheme in which the main character falls into mesmerised sleep in 1887 only to wake up 113 later in his home city, Boston, which in the Year 2000 is part of a perfectly egalitarian society. Julian West, the protagonist, learns about the institutions and ethos of the new world in dialogue with his host, Dr Leete, a retired physician, and his daughter Edith. The sequel of Looking Backward, Equality, is a lengthier description of this new society. Bellamy gained almost immediate international recognition and country-wide acclaim, to the point that he became a keynote speaker for many associations, wrote extensively in his own newspaper, The New Nation, and, eventually, the Nationalist Party was created to advance Bellamy’s ideas. Nationalism, it must be said, was the name Bellamy adopted for his proposal, in an attempt to avoid the word socialism which was associated with violence and social unrest in the wake of the Haymarket Massacre and the mass strikes of the 1870s.
 
An in-depth exploration into Bellamy’s rejection of self-ownership reveals that such a stance is an integral part of his particular form of radical egalitarianism. The writer from Chicopee Falls (Massachusetts) thought that some of the dominant currents of socialism of his time were not radical enough as to how far they were prepared to push in the direction of equality. He thought that Fabians were too attached to the mechanism of retribution according to contribution, whereas Marxists allowed personal assets to have undue influence on distributive matters. These critiques of other varieties of socialism were the basis of his own understanding of equality. Bellamy considered equality to be the only relevant moral relationship between persons. From this uncompromising stance, he mounted a full criticism of the notion of self-ownership and propounded a strong egalitarian principle: “From each, equally; to each equally”.[14] The institutional arrangements of the utopian society that Dr Leete presents to Julian West are carefully designed and crafted to meet this extremely high standard, without giving in to the annulment of singularity or individual tastes. 
 
It is well known that William Morris’s News From Nowhere (1890) is a direct response to Bellamy’s vision, from an anarchistic and pastoral perspective, as opposed to the industrialist and somewhat highly regulated Bellamian society. Morris wrote a critical review in which he remarked that Looking Forward should be “considered seriously” but not taken as a “socialist Bible”. He thought that Bellamy only wanted to get rid of the ills of modern life, without changing that life altogether. He described the utopian system as State Communism, criticised its severe discipline, its industrialism, the major role of great cities, and the limited conception of work as productive activity dissociated from pleasure and creativity. But the core of Morris’s critique was aimed at Bellamy’s peaceful “economical semi-fatalism” that lead to the egalitarian society instead of a conscious struggle for a “free and equal life”.
 
Even though Bellamy does not reply to Morris’s review, many of these objections seem to have shaped the more nuanced portrayal of the utopian society in Equality and other writings.[15] At the same time, he comes up with a more straightforward rebuttal of self-ownership. So, when writing in The New Nation, he contends that it would be a “fraudulent” principle that which “would assume that an individual owns himself and has a valid title to the full usufruct of his powers without incumbrance or obligation on account of his debt to the past and his duties toward the social organism of which he is a part”.[16] At the same time, alongside a handful of acute arguments against increasing social inequalities and an outright indictment of monopoly capitalism, Bellamy pulls off a brilliant case against the entailment of the principle of self-ownership which forbids someone from lending assistance to others unless it is done by a consented interpersonal contract. In Equality, he contends that under capitalism it is accepted that “everyone is entitled to … the result of his abilities” and that this is plainly wrong because “they would naturally acquire advantages over others in wealth seeking as in other ways”.[17] Since he thought that abilities and the capacity for effort were due to the mere chance of birth, Bellamy ruled out the claim that the better endowed had a rightful claim over the advantages they could muster by using those undeserved talents. Therefore, it was the mission of social institutions to keep these inequalities from arising. It is easy to see that Bellamy was advancing similar arguments to those that, in the early 1970s, John Rawls used to build his monumental theory of justice as fairness. 
 
If Rawls springs up in this account of Bellamy’s thought, it is because, in my view, they represent a deep-seated egalitarian trend both in American political thought and, more importantly, in the socialist tradition. The egalitarianism of Bellamy and Rawls, as noted before, is part of a rich ethical tradition that overcame the staunch anti-moralism of the more orthodox Marxist versions of socialism. Rawls spent two years in Oxford, at a time when G. D. H. Cole, who thought of Bellamy as a mere “populariser of other men’s ideas”, was teaching about utopian socialism; when the Labour Party was divided between friends and adversaries of public ownership; and when Tawney’s new edition of Equality rekindled the debate over and against equality of opportunity,[18] as he advocated a kind of relational egalitarianism that despised the crude distributive view marked by “details of the countinghouse”. Without openly calling themselves socialists, both Rawls and Bellamy were no foes of socialism. On the contrary, Bellamy was convinced that his egalitarian model was even more radical than any socialist program of his time, and Rawls repeatedly emphasised that his theory of justice as fairness can be realised under a system of liberal or democratic socialism. Rawls believed “that the choice between a private-property economy and socialism is left open; from the standpoint of the theory of justice alone, various basic structures would appear to satisfy its principles”.[19] Moreover, after dismissing laissez-faire capitalism, welfare-state capitalism, and state socialism as incompatible with his principles of justice as fairness, he asserted that “property-owning democracy and liberal socialism [in] their ideal descriptions include arrangements designed to satisfy the two principles of justice”.[20]
 
In Bellamy and Rawls we can see proof of that "dual temporal existence" of Socialism identified by Freeden. As already mentioned, socialism encompasses both a critique of the present and a projection into the future. Bellamy chose the utopian genre to accomplish both tasks; Rawls, in the same spirit, called his otherwise unadorned and formal theory a “realistic utopia”. Above all, both political thinkers were adamant in rejecting self-ownership as part and parcel of their egalitarian views. It should come as no surprise that the first systematic challenge to Rawls was launched from within the liberal tradition, in the guise of the libertarian theory of Robert Nozick, whose endorsement of self-ownership leads to a form of rugged anti-egalitarianism. To sum up: I understand that self-ownership has no place in a radical egalitarian version of socialism and that a good deal of theoretical work needs to be done in order to refine our understanding of the precise place of this rejection in a morphology of the socialist political ideology.



[1] M. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory. A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 425-426.

[2] Ibid., pp. 417-418.

[3] Ibid., p. 418.

[4] J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice. Revised Edition (Cambridge, MA.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. First published, 1971.)

[5] A. Callinicos, An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press), pp. 107-108.

[6] P. Gilabert and M. O’Neill, “Socialism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.) <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2019/entries/socialism/>.

[7] M. Bevir, The Making of British Socialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), pp. 220-227.

[8] F. Rosemont, ‘Bellamy’s Radicalism Reclaimed’, in Daphne Patai (Ed.) Looking Backward 1988-1888. Essays on Edward Bellamy (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), p. 162.

[9] Ibid., p. 168.

[10] Ibid., p. 176.

[11] J. Dewey, ‘A Great American Prophet’, in Boydston, Jo Ann et. al (eds.) John Dewey. The Later Works 1925-1934. Volume 9: 1033-1934 (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), p. 106. [First published in Common Sense 3 (April 1934), pp. 6-7).

[12] E. Bellamy, Looking Backward. 2000-1887 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

[13] E. Bellamy, Equality (New York: Appleton, 1897).

[14] E. Bellamy, Talks on Nationalism (Chicago, IL: The Peerage Press, 1938), p. 25.

[15] Morris, W., News From Nowhere and Other Writings (London: Penguin, 2004), pp. 353-357.

[16] E. Bellamy, Talks on Nationalism, op. cit., p. 27.

[17] E. Bellamy, Equality, op. cit., p. 107.

[18] K. Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice. Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), pp. 18-24.

[19] J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 228.

[20] J. Rawls, Justice as Fairness. A Restatement (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 138.